The U.S. Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to set new standards for executing mentally disabled prisoners.
The May 27 ruling requires a new capital punishment trial for a Florida inmate who scored 71 on an IQ test, Reuters reported. Florida’s law had said 70 or less indicates mental disability.
The ruling noted the IQ test contains a five-point margin of error, meaning the 71 score could have meant a real level of 66 to 76.
“Florida’s law contravenes our nation’s commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote on behalf of the majority.
“The strict IQ rule struck down by the Supreme Court today is just one example of the many ways in which our state’s death penalty system falls short of constitutional and human rights standards,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Florida had initially determined in 1992 that Freddie Lee Hall, 68, was mentally disabled when he shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy and a woman seven months pregnant.
“The Supreme Court concluded that states should defer to the clinical consensus for determining whether people are mentally disabled,” Reuters reported.
The American Psychiatric Association found that IQ tests should include a “standard error of measurement of five percentage points, meaning results could vary that much either higher or lower,” Hall’s attorneys said. Florida’s test did not take into account this standard of review.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing on behalf of the four dissenters, wrote that the court had embraced a “uniform national rule that is both conceptually unsound and likely to result in confusion.”
Florida’s Republican attorney general, Pan Bondi, declined to comment, saying, “Officials were reviewing the decision.”
John H. Blume, Cornell Law School professor, found that only approximately 10 Death Row inmates with borderline IQ scores stand to benefit immediately from the Supreme Court decision.
–By Charles David Henry